The day has escaped me today, but there is still time for a short and visually potent post which I have been saving up. This is a model of the Royal Crown of the Ryukyu Kingdom, which ruled the Ryukyu Islands and unified Okinawa (and, sporadically, some other islands in the East China Sea). Located between China and Japan, the little kingdom began as a tributary state to China (which is why the crown has the characteristic shape of a Ming royal headdress. During its 400 year history, Ryukyu was generally a tributary of China, Japan, or both, until it was annexed by the Empire of Japan in 1879. After the annexation the former King of Ryuku moved to Tokyo and became a Japanese noble. He brought one crown with him (this is an exact model of the original which is at the Naha City Museum of History and is only shown on special occasions). Confusingly, a second historical crown was kept on Okinawa until the island fell to United States forces near the end of World War II and the royal treasures were hidden in a drainage ditch. An American intelligence officer “found” some of these treasures and carried them off to Boston, however they were returned during the 1950s as the friendship between Japan and the United States solidified. The Okinawa crown however was never discovered…so if you find a thing like this in a Boston yard sale you should buy it up (although you may also be sucked into strange diplomatic games with the United States and Japan). In addition to a large gold hairpin, the Naha crown has 288 ornaments made of gold, silver, crystal, and coral.

I realized that by devoting yesterday’s post to philosophical musings about the folly and sadness of the First World War, I failed to thank America’s veterans. Although I am now a few days off-topic, it is never to late to offer tribute to the brave men and women who have served with such distinction in our armed forces. Fortuitously, I noticed an obscure bronze plaque which is on the wall by the subway exit I take everyday out of the twisted warren of tunnels beneath Grand Central. It looks like it is a hundred years old (indeed some of the print is hard to read) but its poignant thanks to the subway workers who left New York’s tunnels to go serve in overseas trenches remains undiminished. It is also a fitting tribute to America’s citizen-soldiers who step between the world of the warrior and the world of the builder. Check it out next time you are in Grand Central (if you can find it…or anything… and thanks again to everyone who has served in our armed forces or worked for the military.

World War I effectively ended on 11 November, 1918 at 5:00 AM when Germany signed an armistice with the Allied powers. We need a post to appropriately contextualize the end to one of history’s most disastrous chapters, but it is unclear where to start with such a huge and fraught historical subject as the Great War.

I am not going to write about the stupid global politics leading up to (and out of) the war. Suffice to say the vainglorious aristocrats who ran Europe and the world ended up caught in a trap of their own making with no way out other than to bleed their countries dry while hoping for the best. You can read about the events leading up to the war on your own if you wish, but it is turgid stuff and, historians still disagree about the larger lessons (if any).

However a few great works of literature brought home the absolute horror of life in the trenches, and that is what we need to address. The war created a fundamental and inescapable trap for those who served. It was a trap honed to razor sharpness by the circumstances–but it is familiar to anyone who must deal with bureaucracies or just with other people… and therein lies the horror.

So imagine being conscripted to be an infantryman to fight in France or Belgium. After scant training your nation hands you a high-powered rifle, and then plops you into a muddy ditch filled with corpses, explosives, and corned beef until one day you’re told to go “over the top” and charge into an impregnable fortified machine gun nest and certain death or contusion. Really think about the dread of such an order and imagine what you would do.

I am pretty sure you would rush into your death…not because you are a towering model of bravery (though maybe you are), but because what other choice would you have? To refuse and be summarily shot by an officer? To shiftlessly loll around the back until your fellow soldiers noticed and decided you were worthless and arranged an accident? To go stark raving mad on the spot? Those things seem worse than being blasted to pieces by shrapnel and rifle bullets. Likewise they seemed worse to millions of soldiers who knew pretty quickly what the true nature of the war was, but who had no way out other than to carry on in impossible circumstances.

World War I represents the full horror of human society. Acting together, the rest of humankind can make you DO ANYTHING. There is no resisting them.

Modern humans are like ants: we wither and die without our extended networks. These networks are our glory–they provide us resources and information we could never obtain on our own–but, if they somehow go wrong, they are a prison sterner than any Alcatrez or Devil’s Island. Imagine the worst moments of 8th grade. Now imagine it with Howitzers the size of fortresses and poison gas and the worst boss you have ever had (except with power of instant execution over you).

We would like to pretend otherwise but human society is often harmful and vicious. World War I perfectly demonstrates that problem. Everyone said “Huzzah! our brave boys will win the day with true bravery…but true bravery is no match for industrial machines and implacable logistics (and pig-headed politicians). World War I was a perfect inflection point of the stupidities and horrors of preindustrial feudal society with the stupidities and horrors of modernity and machine-like hierarchies.

And then, after all of that, we didn’t learn our lesson. It was only the first round of the two part drama of the World Wars.

Well…so far anyway

It isn’t as though nationalism and monstrous greed have vanished among politicians and business leaders. Enormous machines and hierarchies become more enormous and hierarchical. Politicans (and the rest of us) however have not grown noticeably. Even if there were visionaries and geniuses who could prevent any more such disasters, the rest of us people would never let them.

So thank goodness the Great War has been gone for a hundred years, but we all need to remember it and to remember to work tirelessly at dealing better with each other…if we even can.

No series about the cities of the dead would be complete without a visit to the world’s most populous country, China. Because of China’s 5000 year+ uninterrupted cultural history, there are some extraordinary examples to choose from, like the Western Xian tombs, or the world famous Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, a circular tomb with a circumference of 6.3 km (3.9 miles) and an army of more than 7000 life-sized earthenware soldiers (they don’t build ’em like that anymore, thank goodness). However for artistic reasons, Ferrebeekeeper is going to highlight the most well-known tomb complex in China–the Ming tombs which is a compound of mausoleums built by the emperors of the Ming Dynasty from 1424 to 1644 on the outskirts of Beijing. Indeed today the tombs are now in a suburb of Beijing, surrounded by banks, residential housing parks, and golf courses.

The First Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor, whose rags-to-riches story has no obvious equivalent in history, is NOT buried in the Ming tombs (although don’t forget to follow this spooky link to read about his horrifying excesses), nor is his successor, the Jianwen Emperor, who was usurped and vanished from history. However the third and greatest Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, the mighty Yongle Emperor is buried there. The Yongle Emperor chose the spot according to principles of Feng Shui (and political calculus) and he and 12 other Ming dynasty emperors were interred there along with a dynasty worth of empresses, concubines, favorite princes, et cetera etc. Each of the 13 mausoleums has its own name like the Chang Ling Mausolem, which is tomb to the Yongle Emperor, or the Qing Ling Mausoleum which is the final resting place of the Tai Chang Emperor.

Some of the subjects of past Ferrebeekeeper posts can be found buried in the Ming Tombs–like the Jiajing Emperor (who is in the Yong Ling Mausoleum, if you are keeping track of this at home). Considering how much mercury that guy drank, he is probably perfectly preserved somewhere in there glistening like the silver surfer even after all of these years.

I say probably, because we don’t know. Only three of the 13 tombs have been properly excavated and explored by archaeologists (these known tombs are the tombs of the Yongle Emperor, Longqing Emperor, and the Wanli Emperor). In 1644, the whole necropolis was looted and burned by Li Zicheng, the first (and last) Emperor of the ill-fated Shun Dynasty, but, fortunately, he seems to have burned and looted tombs the way he set up kingdoms–very badly and incompletely. This means there are ten whole tomb complexes of China’s richest greatest emperors which are awaiting the archaeologists of the future (probably…it is always possible that one of China’s more recent autocrats secretly looted everything and sold it to dodgy collectors or hid it under his bed). Imagine the unknown treasures awaiting discovery!

The first paragraph alluded to the artistic merit of this graveyard, and I really meant that. Just look at the beauty of the Sacred Way in the top photo (this is the main entrance to the tombs which Emperors would traverse when visiting the spot to pay homage to their predecessors) or the ceremonial chamber form the Ding Ling Tomb (which is the third image down). Best of all, we have an amazing painting (below)! Look at the this beautiful watercolor map/landscape painting from the late nineteenth century which shows the entire tomb complex (the painting itself belongs the Library of Congress). Naturally, if you click the painting it will not blow up to full size here (thanks to the hateful anti-aesthetic nature of WordPress). However here is a link to the original image at Wikipedia, you can expand it to immense size on your computer and take a personal tour of one of the world’s most lovely and historically significant tomb complexes.

Welcome back to Ferrebeekeeper’s special Halloween series about cities! Obviously, no such effort would be complete without venturing once again into the realms of the Gothic, that ill-defined but very real concept which encompasses literature, history, culture, and architecture in exceedingly different (and yet weirdly unified) ways across a span of 1700 years. My first inclination here was to present some famous Gothic fantasy cities—Minis Tirith, Gotham, Lankhmar, Oldtown, and Ankh-Morpork (sob) but the daunting nature of this project quickly became obvious. Maybe we will revisit these places later (I feel like I have lived in each of them), but right now let us turn to what is arguably the world’s most successful actual extant Gothic city, which is also a place I don’t know nearly as well as those fantasy burgs: the great metropolis of Barcelona!

I have legions of friends who return from Barcelona singing its praises as the world’s greatest party city, and I remember lots of partial factoids from the 1992 Summer Olympics (which were completely amazing: Thanks Barcelona!). Sadly, I don’t know much about the actual city which is too bad–of all of the places on Earth, Barcelona has true claim to being the most Gothic city, not just because of its Gothic quarter (the somber medieval buildings were added to and spruced up at the end of the 19th century) , its ancient Gothic cathedral (the Barcelona Cathedral, seen at the top of the post and immediately above), its new Gothic cathedral (The Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família designed by Gaudi, which is immediately below), or its many other Gothic architectural wonders, but instead because of its history.

Barcelona has two foundation myths, both of which are amazing. According to legend it was either founded by the great Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca (Hannibal’s dad) or by Hercules himself as he roamed the Mediterranean world during his famous labors. Wow! The truth is only slightly less amazing. The Romans first built Barcelona into a major city, but they built on top of a settlement which was already ancient. Archaeologists have found artifacts/remains which can be dated back to 5000 years ago.

Ancient Roman Burial Ground in Barcelona

As the Roman Empire blew apart (because of climate change, cultural stagnation, and disastrous misrule by corrupt dolts), strange groups of barbaric invaders from the hinterlands marauded through what had once been the most prosperous provinces of the West. Among these tribes were Huns, Franks, Sueves, Vandals, Alans, and Burgundians (goodness help us), but perhaps the most infamous of these groups were the Visigoths, who sacked Rome itself in 410 AD. The Visigoths warred with Rome and its allies for generations while they sought a permanent kingdom (hoping perhaps to become like the Franks, who grabbed up the most beautiful parts of France). For a time it seemed the Visigoths had found a permanent home in what is now southern France, but the tides of War turned against them and they moved southwards.

Thus, in the beginning of the 6th century AD, Barcelona was the capital of the Visigoth Kingdom. In 511 AD, the king of the Visigoths was a nine-year-old child named Amalaric. Amalaric was an Arian Christian, which is to say he was a follower of the nontrinitarian Christological doctrine of Arius, not that he marched around in studded jackets throwing dumb white power fist salutes (although, frankly, he probably did that too). He was married to Chrotilda, the daughter of Clovis I and she was a devout Catholic devoted to the trinity. The two fought ferociously about religion and Amalaric would beat Chrotilda savagely to demonstrate the superiority of his Christological doctrines. At one pointshe even sent a towel stained with her blood to her brother Childebert I to show him the benighted state of her marriage.

Hmm…We have fallen down a bit of a Medieval history rabbit hole here in describing why Barcelona is a Gothic city. To succinctly recap, it was the capital of the Visigoths and it has whole districts of Gothic buildings which are either Medieval, or made in faux Medieval styles. And what about Amalaric? In the early 530s, he fought the Ostragoth army and was defeated. He fled back to Barcelona but was betrayed and murdered by his own men (perhaps at the command of Theudis, governor of Barcelona. Some say you can still hear Amalaric’s ghost, angrily promulgating Arian doctrines among the midnight bubble disco parties of present-day Barcelona, but to me that sounds like something some disreputable blogger made up to get hits.

Persepolis (pictured above) was the ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid Empire, the great Persian Empire which ruled the near east from around 550 BC to 330 BC (when Alexander the Great swept through and conquered it). Persepolis was apparently a rather strange city—an imperial showplace of palaces, temples, and stately grandeur, but with very few inhabitants, at least compared to the thriving Persian cities of Babylon, Susa, and Ecbatana. Archaeologists are still arguing about whether it was a palace complex, an administrative center, or a seasonal city for high Zoroastrian festivals. Whatever the case, Persepolis’ strange quasi-urban nature is a good segue to today’s featured location: Naqsh-e Rustam, a Persian necropolis which is located 12 km (7.5 miles) from the site of Persepolis (both locations are high in the mountains of what is today the Fars province of Iran).

Naqsh-e Rustam, the cemetery of Persian emperors, had even fewer inhabitants than Persepolis, and mostly those inhabitants were (and still are!) deceased. The most important tombs are four large tombs cut high into the living rock of the cliff face. These are the tombs of Darius I (c. 522-486 BC), Xerxes I (c. 486-465 BC), Artaxerxes I (c. 465-424 BC), and Darius II, the great emperors of ancient Persia. The facade to Xerxes tomb is pictured immediately below.

Not many cities have only 4 long dead inhabitants. Indeed, the site of Naqsh-e Rustam was sacred long before the Achaemenids carved their unearthly mausoleums. The oldest carvings are dated to around 1000 BCE and thought to be from the Elamite kingdoms. Later on, the monarchs of the Sassanid dynasty (the empire which stood in counterweight opposition to Imperial Rome) also carved great reliefs there. These illustrate battles and victories. In the middle of the complex is a mysterious cubic tower known as the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht. It was made at the same time as the tombs and is presumably a Zoroastrian sacred building, but nobody really knows what is was originally for.

I wrote about this astonishing place, because I was struck by the majesty and remoteness of the great tombs carved out of living rock, but now that I have started writing, I realize that Naqsh-e Rustam strains any definition of a city (other than as a place of great human-crafted edifices). The urban culture, the political hegemony, and the sheer human labor required to craft such a site are obvious from the 2500 year old architecture, but the bigger questions about why humans make the things we make, or even about why the Persians organized their great civilization in this fashion are not answered by the haunting graves an monuments.

Earth. The blue planet, home of gentle water and thriving life. A rare jewel hurtling through a cold, ancient explosion of dust and gas. Our home. But what the heck does it look like? Satellite imagery has gifted us with an objective view of our planet, and it truly is beautiful. We are indeed unique among the stars. Thank you, science (and, ahem, the cold war space race).

But I’m speaking about our mental understanding of where we live. The shape of the Earth within us. How continents and countries, oceans and seas, exist in our mind’s eye, influencing our affections and prejudices. Our identities depend very much on how we imagine our literal place on Earth. Who we are is where our feet touch.

Try as we might, we’re not great at doing this. The good news, as usual, is we’ve made some extraordinary art in the attempt to know our place.

The above is a world map created by Abu Ishaq Ibrahim ibn Muhammad al-Farisi al Istakhri in the year 1193. Not much is known about Al-Istakhri apart from this map and a book with the Tolkienesque title Kitab al-masalik wa-al-mamalik (Book of Routes and Realms). But Al-Istakhri was hardly alone. The 10th century was full of ambitious Islamic mapmakers and world-definers, curious people unafraid of the wider world; a sad contrast to the cringing tribalism so common across the globe today. While I can’t make heads or tails of this map as a piece of cartography, I would be proud to have it painted on the hull of my spaceship. If I had one.

No, this isn’t a wrinkled stretch of petrified rhino hide. It is actually a 14,000 year old map! Discovered in a cave in Abuantz, Spain, the stone engraving has mountains, streams, large rivers, and shows choice spots for hunting and foraging. There are even ibex herds marked in the stone, their 14,000 year old grazing habits recorded for all time.

This is the world as seen by the medieval Christians living in the 1300s. It figures then, that it was drawn using biblical time as its guiding geological principal, instead of the more typical concept of physical space. This more of a spiritual map than an Earthly one. Beginning at the top with Christ looking down upon the Earth, the viewer takes a descending journey from the Garden of Eden all the way down to the Strait of Gibraltar and the Pillars of Hercules. In the center: Jerusalem. To the right: Africa. Note (if you can on these tiny images) the hideous beasts and frightening monsters lurking along the coasts and at the margins, ready to devour any pilgrim foolhardy enough to venture beyond the watchful eye of the Christian God.

If you’re anything like me, this map is almost as alien and confusing as the others. My eye doesn’t know where to go! My brain rejects what it sees! My red-blooded American heart is shocked and offended! Look at Africa. Now look at Europe. King Leopold would’ve had an aneurism looking at this map. Shame he didn’t, the bastard. How can we be decent––or merely responsible––tenants when we don’t understand the rooms of the house?

It is the first day of October, which means you need to start getting ready for Halloween horror coming to Ferrebeekeeper at the end of the month! Every year we have done a special theme week to highlight the monsters lurking in the many shadows of existence. As all of you know, there is darkness out there: it lurks just beneath our appetites, our skin, our mortal lives…Ye! there is a ghastly void beneath the pretty autumn flowers themselves! As a teaser of things to come later this month, I am doubling back to an earlier post which had one of my drawings in it.

The drawing was hard to see in that post (because WordPress seemingly no longer blows images up to true size if you click on them) however it took me an enormous amount of time and it looks very ghastly and disconcerting in the real world. It is another one of my allegorical flounder drawings, but this one concerns the hunger, carnage, and obliteration which, alas, seem to be ineluctable features of all systems involving living things…perhaps of all systems, full stop.

There is a story I imagined while drawing this: what if you were wandering through the barrowlands of Europe when you found an ancient flatfish made of hammered gold? You would grab the treasure and begin to carry it off, however closer examination might give you pause, for, graven into the solid gold, are vile butchers, sorcerers, monsters, and dark gods. Assembled on the surface of the piece are a monster andrewsarchus, an underworld goddess leaping out of a well with entrails in her hand, cannibals, and a parasitic tapeworm thing. All of these frightful entities are gathered around an evil sentient tree with hanged men it its boughs, and the entire tableau is on the back of a terrible moaning flatfish which seems almost to writhe in your hand. When you look up at the sky the night is descending on the wold. The megaliths take on a sinister new aspect and the very stars seem inimical. it is all too easy to imagine the black holes eating away the center of each galaxy. With dawning fear you realize you need to put this unearthly artifact right back where you found it.

Here at Ferrebeekeeper we have delved into giant ancient trees, yet we left out one of the most astonishing and iconic trees of all–the African baobab (Adansonia digitate). Full grown baobabs are among the most massive flowering plants in the world, and, like the yews, the sequoias, and the great oaks, they can live for an enormously long time—up to 2500 years according to carbon dating. The African baobabs live on the dry, hot savannas of sub-Saharan Africa. The trees grow up to 25 m (85 feet) in height, but it is their mass which makes them astonishing: trunks with a diameter of 14 m (46 feet) are not unknown. Shaped like jugs or squat bottles, these trunks help the trees store precious water during droughts. Below the ground, the trees are even more astonishing. The roots grow wider and deeper than the branches which is why enormous baobabs can be found in seemingly parched scrublands. Their roots seek out secret water basins and find hidden underground rivulets.

Baobabs are also known as “dead rat trees” because of the appearance of their fruit. Admittedly this does not make the fruit sound super appealing, yet it is edible and nutritious and a market is springing up for baobab fruit smoothies. In addition to providing fruit for humans, the leaves and bark of the tree is important to wildlife on the great savannas.

Although the trees are practically synonymous with the landscape, humans know less about them than one might suspect. Although the trees are fertilized by pollen born by fruit bats and bush babies, the full process of fertilization is not entirely understood. Indeed, botanists are increasingly unsure whether Adansonia digitate is actually just one species. The other baobab trees are largely native to Madagascar (although there is one Australian species, and a species on the Arabian Peninsula) so it seems like the genus originated on the microcontinent and then spread to the great supercontinent.

As you might imagine, the baobab features heavily in innumerable myths, folktales, and religions of Africa. It is the magic fairy tree of that land. My personal favorite story comes from the Zambezi basin, where tribes tell of how the proud baobabs grew so tall and beautiful that they began to rival the gods themselves. In wrath the gods inverted the trees so that the fat roots now grow into the sky, but the trees were still splendid, till evil spirits put a curse on the strange white flowers. Now anyone who picks these fantastic blossoms is subject to terrible bad luck…more specifically a lion will kill and eat that person! That should keep the blossoms safe.

But, of course, in the Anthropocene world, such made-up curses don’t keep the trees safe at all. There is one true curse on the great baobabs. Across Africa they are dying. Trees which were saplings during the fall of the Roman Empire (the western half!) are swiftly succumbing to an unknown scourge. To quote a tragic article in the Atlantic, “Of the 13 oldest known baobabs in the world, four have completely died in the last dozen years, and another five are on the way, having lost their oldest stems.” The full truth of what is felling the giants is subject to debate, but botanists and arborists agree that the rapid warming of the world is the most likely culprit. Trees which lived for two millennia in arid wastelands in the heat of equatorial Africa are suddenly dying from high temperatures. Some of these trees have been landmarks for countless generations of people. It is as though a mountain died and withered up

I am not sure how to properly quantify something so troubling, but the truly ancient past offers some upsetting clues about what might soon become of the Baobabs’ home (which is humankind’s first home too). Set aside your tears for the great trees and join me, tomorrow. We are going to take another trip back to the beginning of the Eocene, the “dawn age” which calls to me again and again. In that sweltering summer world of 56 million years ago, there are clues about what will be the fate of baobab trees and of their home ecosystem. The Eocene was a world without ice. The arctic oceans were warm year-round. Rainforests filled with unknown marsupials covered Antarctica. I hope you will boldly join me in going back to that bygone age, but I am worried you will not like what we find, and I am worried we are not going to like what we find in the future either.

God DAMMIT, humankind, can you not even let me end on a chilling note without making it stupid?

We think of the statues of Ancient Greece as glistening white marble, yet they were beautifully painted in a rainbow of colors to imitate life. So too, the poetry of the ancient Greek world was meant to be performed to music…maybe Sappho and Pindar had more in common with the Beatles, Slim Shady, and Bob Dylan than we think (although I, for one, will never accept that bad Nobel prize). Unfortunately, the music of the ancient classical world has always been elusive. We know how deeply the ancients praised its lyrical form and its emotional depth. We even have extensive descriptions and directions of musical pieces, complete with comprehensive explanations of tones, scales, and meter. In a few cases we have the notes themselves, there are extant scores for tunes which show each noise to be made in the fashion of modern music (albeit with a different notation). Yet these aids have never been good enough to make musical recreations which were compelling. The oddball classicists who tried to perform the songs from the ages of Athens and Alexander, succeeded only in making discordant and unpleasant harmonies. Either the musical archaeologists were doing it wrong, or worse, the ancient world had a tin ear (and the sweeping rhythm of the poetry and art makes this seem unlikely).

A new project has come together to try another stab at ancient Greek music. The researchers and musicians based the heart of their work around recently discovered auloi which were found in superb condition. The aulos was the “twin flute” of antiquity—actually a double reed instrument something like a twin oboe. The aulos was the instrument of shepherds, slaves, and entertainers (as opposed to the expensive lyre which was the instrument of aristocrats, academicians, and such). Although i have never heard it, the aulos is important to me because of the story of Apollo and Marsyas, a myth which is very dear to me (and instantly familiar to all artists who hear the story).

Using these ancient auloi, musical scholars and musicians have exhaustively reviewed the ancient notes and commentary. They have poured effort into understanding weird ancient musical terms like “mode, enharmonic, diesis.” They read the poetry and they practiced…and, yes, they invented and guessed and made things up with their imaginations (which surely is the greatest magic of art, anyway). I will let you read about their amazing methodologies on your own, but the upshot is you can listen to a closer (?) approximation of ancient Greek music.

[Imagine that Youtube clip was playing here: I would update my wordpress plan to make this possible, but it would cost $48, which would cause me to go bankrupt]

I am not sure I am fully convinced. In my head, the aulos sounds more like a cross between a nightingale, an oboe, and a small shepherd’s bagpipe—sad and haunting and sweet with a faint hint of something crass. In this clip it sounds like a vuvuzela making love to a giant hornet. However, who am I to judge? My ideas of musical beauty may have been forever compromised by the peerless euphony of 19th century music. Maybe the clip is closer to the historical truth than I would like to imagine. Whatever the case, the new ancient songs are still worth listening to—they are alien, yet familiar, and not without a certain majestic ceremonial quality. And, best of all, the scholarship, the research, and the musical craftsmanship provides us with another step closer to recreating the ancient melodies that haunt us in poems and in dark myths.